General

Enciclopedia Virus reports that the FBI confiscated SCO servers and workstation. These seizures are, according to an IBM employee, both in connection with the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit about the copyright of certain IBM-contributed Linux source files, and with the spread of the MyDoom/Novarg worm. So, SCO seems to be suspected of having brought this worm into the wild by itself (or by one of its employees) to spin-doctor the public opinion about the Linux and open source community.



If you can't read the article because you don't speak Spanish, don't worry, the fish and some basic knowledge of Latin vocabulary helps a lot in understanding the text.

IE(1)                     BSD General Commands Manual                    IE(1)



NAME

     ie - Microsoft Internet Explorer



SYNOPSIS

     ie [-acfghkp] [-m alternate-passwd-file] [-length of time]



DESCRIPTION

     Ie is the web browser. The only web browser. Netscape is irrelevant.

     Opera is irrelevant. Ie is your master. Kneel.



     There are two ways to use ie: non-executed binary and insecure mode. The

     non-executed binary is the mode ie ships in. There are no flags or direc-

     tions for use in this mode.

...

You can download the complete manpage here.

Bastards!

Oh, I really love this kind of Google hacks.

One idea that is floating around in my mind is a way of combining HTTP and LDAP. Usually, the virtual directory tree that is accessible via HTTP is mapped to some directory tree in the filesystem. But why always the filesystem? LDAP directories also provide a hierarchical tree, similar to the filesystem (well, Unix filesystems aren't actually trees, but DAGs). So, why not map the virtual HTTP directory tree to an LDAP directory? This would look something like this:

http://somehost.com:80/o=foo/ou=bar/cn=baz would be mapped to cn=baz,ou=baz,o=foo,port=80,dc=somehost,dc=com in the LDAP directory. The cn=baz,... entry could be of some special object class that is yet to be defined, but it could be a text file, an HTML file, an image, a reference to an external program that should be called (CGI could be implemented this way), whatever. Such an object could also contain the right MIME type or access permissions, so there would be a better transparence for such kind of information.



But currently, this is only a vague idea, with nothing written down (except for this weblog entry), and absolutely no existing code. Feedback is welcome, better (or additional) ideas too, and if anybody wants to work on this, send me preview code.

...or why I think that ESA's mars mission is superior to the NASA mission that is going on at the same time.



Both ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Administration) decided to do their own missions to mars at about the same time. ESA decided to send one orbiter and one lander to mars, NASA decided to play safe and sent out not one but two landers, Spirit and Opportunity. And of course, they have their own orbiter, too. ESA was first, but their lander failed for so far unknown reasons (we will know as soon as people settle on mars . Fortunately, this didn't hurt the mission too much, since the lander including a rover was only a "gimmick" that was intended to retrieve only a small fraction of all the scientific data.



NASA reached mars a few days later, and their first lander, Spirit, landed successfully. What Spirit did so far was shooting a few pictures, and rolling out of the actual lander. It is also intended to get some stone probes, to analyze it and to send the results back to earth. Opportunity is designed to do the same things, but it landed on the other side of mars, 10000 km away from Spirit.



But when you look at the actual scientific data produced by both the ESA and the NASA mission, you will see that NASA definitely does the better PR work. But what have they produced so far? A few snapshots and panorama pictures (which are nice, but well...), and some stone probes. But due to their design, they can't drill down further than maybe a few meters (if even that deep). That's all nice and useful (especially the stone probes for the geologists), but IMHO, it's not really something special: we've seen pictures from mars before, and we've analyzed probes from mars before.



So, I'm a lot more impressed by the work done by ESA: although they lost their lander (what a pity...), they concentrated not so much on the PR (no "the best crew in the world!" cheering) but more on actual science, and

• produced detailled 3D maps of parts of mars which has never done before, and where the big geological structures can be analyzed better than ever before.
• proved the existence of water on the south pole of mars. NASA asserted that they had detected that in 2001 already, but in fact, they didn't, because they didn't have the right equipment. All they were able to detect at that time was hydrogen, which is a possible indicator for water, but definitely not a prove. IMHO, proving that water exists on mars is the biggest scientific leap in the history of mars exploration, as it solves the problem of water and fuel supply, which are the big show-stoppers for a possible manned mars mission.
• measured the actual temperature on the mars surface (up to +4 degrees Celsius), which is higher than estimated before.
• is about to create extremely detailled satellite pictures of the mars surface (with a resolution of 1x1 meter per pixel).

These are all really interesting scientific that NASA wasn't able to provide so far. So, thanks to ESA for doing such a valuable work.



For more information on both mars missions, check out the ESA portal and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which both provide extensive information on their respective missions.

13:40 <@fire> gibtz ein adapterkabel von ipv4 auf ipv6 ?

An old proverb states that all software from the University of Washington sucks. This is definitely true for software like pine, and it also turned out to be true for uw-imapd, the IMAP server that I used until yesterday.



Actually, the only reason I was using uw-imapd before was because I had a lot of mbox files before I switched from local mail fetching to my own IMAP server, and it was the least pain to switch over to IMAP using uw-imapd. But mysteriously, uw-imapd got a lot slower during the last year, and so I started observing uw-imapd closer. What was clear before was that using mbox as mailbox file format would be extremely inefficient. But when I attached strace to the imapd process, the whole thing looked even more horrible: while the client is total idle, imapd appears to have some kind of background noise of a lot of system calls, mostly alarm(). So it seems that uw-imapd does some kind of polling, instead of working in a event-based fashion using select() or poll(). This definitely sucks. So, I switched over to courier-imapd, which is nice to handle, uses Maildir mailboxes, which are much nicer (random access to mails in a mailbox, 1:1 mapping of operations on a mail to filesystem operations, faster backups when using rsync, ...), it reacts and loads mailboxes a lot faster than uw-imapd, and most importantly, it keeps the load a lot lower. What I pity that I virtually tortured myself for over a year with this crappy uw-imapd.

About 2/3 of all the emails that I sent and received in the last two years were spam or worms (mostly the infamous Swen worm):

andreas@tintifax:~$ ls -l spam swen

-rw-------    1 andreas  andreas  956976042 Jan 24 17:58 spam

-rw-------    1 andreas  andreas  252381193 Jan 23 21:01 swen

andreas@tintifax:~$ 

gna

arved's weblog brought me to a wonderful application where you can check which countries you've visited so far and the (web) application draws you a map where all the countries where you've been already are marked in red, and all others in green. Unfortunately, currently it's really slow, most likely because it's floating around in many people's weblogs, IRC channels and ICQ/Jabber discussions.



That reminds me that I should maybe travel around a little bit more. South America maybe?

As some of you may have noticed, the legendary troll site http://goatse.cx has been taken down. So I decided to simply mirror goatse.cx (from another mirror). You can find it here [if you are under 18, better don't click]. I do this to preserve an important piece of internet and troll culture to the after-world. More information on shock sites and especially goatse.cx can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

I wrote my own tinyurl.com-like service. I was bored, so I sat down and simply hacked it into my computer. You can find it here. It still has one bug: in Mozilla, you have to click the submit button. Simply pressing return inside the text input doesn't work. Don't ask me why, I'm trying not to do any web "programming" if only possible.

All 10 GB iPods in and around Linz are totally sold out, and nobody knows yet when the 15 GB models will arrive. :-/ That's very frustrating, as I simply wanted to pick one up yesterday, take it home, and use it. And not even my favorite Mac dealer could help me out.

Martin Piskernig sent me the following quote from the slashdot forum that is so ridicoulus that I have to post it here:



KDE was cooked up in the same country that started both World Wars, embraced philosophies of destruction and hate (such as Nazism and Fascism), and spawned evil murderous maniacs such as Adolf Hitler.



By using KDE you are implicitly endorsing these hatemongering people and their genocidal dogmas.



A true patriot uses GNOME, written in the land of the free and the home of the brave. By using Gnome you are re-affirming your American ideals and supporting the open doctrine of truth, liberty, and justice for all.



So, the choice is yours: Do you use Gnome or are you a terrorist?

Right now I finished my second, improved version of the zeroconf for nullmailer patch. Thanks to Sandy McArthur, I managed to redo the patch without forking and all that ugly stuff. He told me how to properly use the "salt" stuff (some kind of event dispatcher) of howl, so no more running sw_rendezvous_run(). Oh, btw, the patch only works with howl 0.9.1, as howl 0.9 seems to have some kind of bug when using sw_salt_step() instead of handing over control to howl by running sw_rendezvous_run() (which is pretty crappy, as you would have to design your program around howl).



Expect more zeroconf/Rendezvous patches in the next few days. Now that I finally got it how to use howl, this unleashed my programming powers.

And here another funny fake banner that I found today: